India Fellows Years: Indian Fellows 2023-2024

P.K. Yasser Arafath

Dr. P.K. Yasser Arafath is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delhi and a historian of medieval and early modern India. He was L.M. Singhi Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge in 2017.

Dr. Arafath received his Ph.D. from the University of Hyderabad, and his research primarily focuses on South India. He is interested in its intellectual traditions, transliterated literature, history of violence, communities in the Indian Ocean, and the cultural history of the body and hygiene in the region. He has co-edited Sultana’s Sisters: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction (Routledge, 2021) and The Hijab: Islam, Women and the Politics of Clothing (Simon & Schuster, 2022). Dr. Arafath won the prestigious Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer Best Published Paper Award (2020–2021) for his research article that he published in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Arafath is examining how a section of South Asian Islamic scholars shaped the gender sensibilities of the Mappila-Muslims of Malabar by engaging with multiple discourses within the region and beyond in the 19th century. His project aims to do a systematic study of gender and sexuality in Arabi-Malayalam, a transliterated textual tradition in the Indian Ocean region that entails writing Malayalam —the native tongue of Kerala —in Arabic script. This study will add to the existing body of knowledge on gendered Islam in South Asia and gender discourses in South Asian Islamic cultures in the 19th century.

Madhu Singh

Dr. Madhu Singh is Professor at the Department of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow. After a Ph.D. in modern British poetry, she branched into exploring different dimensions of the British rule in India. Her research interests over the last two decades include anticolonial movements in India, colonial epidemics, Indian Renaissance under colonialism, and documentation of endangered languages and communities. She recently edited a book titled Outbreaks: An Indian Pandemic Reader (Pencraft international, New Delhi, 2021), which deals with the complex challenges of past and present epidemics/pandemics in India in their socio-cultural, literary and historical contexts.

Dr. Singh received a visiting scholarship at the School of Asian and Oriental Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2018-19 for her project on the Bene Israel Jews of India.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Singh is working on “Revolutionary Print Culture, Ephemeral Remains, and Vernacular Subjectivities in North America During and After Ghadar Movement (1910-1940)”. She aims to trace the role of California-based periodicals by expatriate Punjabi-Sikh writers in the anticolonial struggle in India, spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is also redressing gaps and silences in existing research on the Ghadar movement from interdisciplinary perspectives.

Gourinath Samudrala

Prof. Gourinath Samudrala is Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He earned his M.Sc in biotechnology from the University of Pune and his Ph.D. from AIIMS, New Delhi. Before joining JNU, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Brandeis University, MA. Prof. Samudrala is well-recognized by several national organizations and science academies. Recently, he was awarded the STAR research award 2021 by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Government of India. He was also awarded the Innovative Young Biotechnologist Award, 2006 and the National Bioscience Award, 2013 by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India. In addition, he is a recipient of Indo-US Science and Technology fellowship, 2010, Visitors Award from President of India, 2016 and was elected as a fellow of prestigious Indian National Science Academy in 2018.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Prof. Samudrala is constructing and validating an artificial sarcomere using E. histolytica myosins. Understanding how myosins evolved is not only important to uncover the secrets of sarcomere, but also enables us to gain insights into how these molecules sustained the natural selection pressure. Will the filamentous unit from Entamoeba histolytica myosin-II be remarkably different from human nonmuscle myosin-II and other myosin-IIs. Prof. Samudrala’s project is exploring the possibility of artificial sarcomere/muscle fiber generation of an amoeboid myosin or any other myosin.

Nanditha Rao

Dr. Nanditha Rao is Assistant Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Bengaluru in the VLSI Systems group. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from IIT Bombay in 2017. Her research interests include FPGA based acceleration for machine learning, RISC-V and radiation-hardened designs. She has received the SERB Core Research Grant 2018, MITACS Globalink Research Award 2018 and SERB SUPRA research grant 2022.

Dr. Rao believes in encouraging students in technology and leadership roles. She took up administrative roles such as General Secretary of a women’s hostel in IIT Bombay for which she was awarded the Institute Organizational Citation. She is currently the associate warden of women’s hostel in IIIT Bangalore. She worked as a hardware design engineer at Intel for five years prior to her Ph.D. Her work at Intel involved signal integrity simulations of PCIe, LVDS, DisplayPort and HDMI interfaces. She received 13 Intel Spontaneous Recognition Awards and one Intel Divisional Recognition Award.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Rao is working on improving the performance of hardware accelerators for convolutional neural networks (CNN). CNNs are most commonly used today in computer vision, and image and video processing. The CNN accelerator implemented using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) enables significant performance improvement and power efficiency compared to GPU implementations. However, to improve the performance on the FPGA further, it is important to explore the appropriate mapping of the accelerator architecture onto optimal FPGA resources, which is what Dr. Rao is focusing on during this fellowship.

Pampa Panwar

Prof. Pampa Panwar is a Professor at IICD, Indian Institute of Crafts & Design, Jaipur, Rajasthan. Before completing her master’s from Slade School of Fine Art, University College London under Commonwealth Scholarship in 1993, Prof. Panwar earned her MFA from M.S. University, Vadodara and her BFA from Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan.

On a French Government Scholarship, Prof. Panwar was artist-in-residence at CAMAC, Centre d’Art, Marnay-sur-Seine, France and she did a Swiss Arts Council’s research residency at Lucerne School of Art & Design, Switzerland. She was also awarded a Senior Fellowship by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. She conceptualized, directed, costume-designed and performed a dance-based video art – Gently, into the other side of time, which received the National Exhibition Award – Senior Category at 29th National Exhibition of Contemporary Art, South Central Zone Cultural Centre, Ministry of Culture, Government of India.

During her Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Prof. Panwar aims to explore the importance of contemporary crafts as a continuing narrative with focus on narrative quilts, and how craft has merged into art and vice-versa in the contemporary context of both India and the US. By studying the case of the Gee’s Bend quilters of Alabama, her project considers the following questions: how have these quilts come to define a community and expression of a culture? Is it possible to apply the classic Indian understanding of nine effective states of Navarasa within an American context? Narrative quilts serve as a lens for exploring these questions. Ultimately, with the help of her research, she plans to develop an inter-disciplinary visual work at her host Institution.

Vinod Narayanan

Dr. Vinod Narayanan earned his Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru, and is currently Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat. He joined IIT Gandhinagar in 2009, where he supervised two Ph.D. students and twenty master’s students.

Dr. Narayanan’s research expertise is in theoretical and computational fluid dynamics. His research interests are hydrodynamic stability and transition to turbulence, fully developed turbulence, mixing and combustion in high-speed flows. His team has developed various computational models in hydrodynamic stability and flow control. He has authored more than 20 publications in peer-reviewed international journals and more than 50 articles in conference proceedings.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Narayanan aims to develop numerical models and experimental techniques for suspensions in isotropic and wall-bounded turbulent flows. This project fundamentally investigates the fluid mechanics of suspension, its basic properties, and its effects on large-scale dynamics, using a combination of high-resolution numerical simulations and state-of-the-art laboratory experiments.

Ashish Kumar Srivastava

Dr. Ashish Kumar Srivastava is Scientific Officer-G at Nuclear Agriculture and Biotechnology Division of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai. In addition, he is permanent faculty at Homi Bhabha National Institute, Mumbai and visiting faculty at the Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences, University of Mumbai.

His research work is focused on developing strategies for enhancing crop resilience towards different abiotic stresses. The stimulatory potential of thiourea has been demonstrated for enhancing stress tolerance and crop productivity through lab and small-scale field experiments. Further, using the “multi-omics” based systems biology and genome-wide association mapping, Dr. Srivastava has delineated the molecular basis of thiourea-mediated action. In addition, he has worked on peaceful application of radiation and demonstrated that gamma-irradiated chitosan can boost the productivity of different crops under realistic field conditions. He is a recipient of various national and international awards/fellowships, including Young Scientist Award of National Academy of Sciences, India (NASI), Allahabad, 2018; Newton-Bhabha International Grant from DBT-BBSRC, 2018; President International Fellowship from Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, 2016; Young Scientist Medal from Indian National Science Academy (INSA), 2014; Young Scientist Award from the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), 2014 and EMBO Short-Term Fellowship, 2011. He has also edited books for reputable publishers, like Wiley and Springer.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence tenure, Dr. Srivastava is working to reduce arsenic accumulation in rice, using a combination of chemical and genetic approaches. The findings will help in developing arsenic-free rice, which is safer for human consumption.

Amit Kumar

Dr. Amit Kumar is an Assistant Professor of Geoinformatics at the Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi. He earned his Ph.D. in remote sensing technology from the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra. His research focuses on urban ecology and sustainability, and anthropogenic and climate change impacts on urban and forest ecosystems. Some of his current projects include DBT-Mapping and quantitative assessment of plant resources in Central India; R&D projects sponsored by Space Application Centre (ISRO) under AVIRIS-NG; L&S band SAR-NISAR; GISAT missions; a project sponsored by Columbia University; and IISc, Bengaluru coordinated Long-term Ecological Observatories program of forest dynamics and soil processes developed under the Climate Change Action Plan of MoEFCC at pan India scale. Dr. Kumar is also a member of the IUCN-Commission on Ecosystem Management, South Asia and Global Forests Biodiversity Initiatives, USA, as well as a recipient of Fellow and Young Scientist awards of SSCE, New Delhi, SERB-ITSS, Government of India among others. He has published more than 100 research articles in different journals and books of international repute, including Nature Ecology and Evolution, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), Science of The Total Environment, and CITIES.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Kumar is building an improved global forest above-ground biomass map in the Anthropocene using large-scale forest inventory data, high-resolution satellite observations, and machine learning techniques at Purdue University. His research will help in developing strategies to accomplish SDGs 13 and 15, which aim at sustainable forest management, by providing insights into the global carbon budget within diverse forest ecosystems.

Prabakar Krishna Murthy

Dr. Prabakar Krishna Murthy is a scientist at Materials Science Group, Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR), Kalpakkam. He obtained his Ph.D. in physics from Osmania University, Hyderabad in the year 2007 and joined IGCAR in the same year through the prestigious Dr. K. S. Krishnan Research Associate scheme.

His current research interests include microfabrication, microcantilever-based sensors, and semiconductor neutron detectors. He has extensively worked on the design, fabrication, and characterization of surface-enhanced SiO2 microcantilevers for ultrafast and ultrasensitive relative humidity (RH) sensing applications. Using this sensor, his group could demonstrate real-time monitoring of RH variation during human breath cycles. Dr. Krishna Murthy has also studied the photo-induced deflection in Au/Si microcantilevers for ultrasensitive temperature sensing applications and capacitive micro-machined ultrasonic transducers for NDE applications. He has published 38 research articles in national and international journals. He is also Assistant Professor in physics at Homi Bhabha National Institute, Mumbai and has guided two Ph.D. students and several graduate/postgraduate students.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Krishna Murthy is developing a standoff (remote), ultrasensitive and extremely selective detection method for lung cancer by sensing the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released in the human exhaled breath using photothermal cantilever deflection spectroscopy.

Tushar Kanti Dutta

Dr. Tushar Kanti Dutta is working as Senior Scientist at the Division of Nematology, ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi. He obtained his undergraduate degree from Uttarbanga Krishi Viswavidyalaya (UBKVV), Cooch Behar, West Bengal. He obtained his master’s (2005-2007) and doctoral (2007-2010) degrees from IARI. During his doctoral program, he visited Rothamsted Research, UK for 10 months under the aegis of UKIERI fellowship funded by the British Council. He has been a regular faculty member at IARI since the last 12 years. His research interests include investigating the molecular basis of plant-nematode interaction using RNA interference and CRISPR-Cas9 strategies. Additionally, he has characterized a number of novel bacterial toxins from insect-parasitizing bacteria that symbiotically associate with nematodes.

He has been conferred with Associateship from the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS) and has received the Jawaharlal Nehru Award (ICAR) in addition to several other young scientist awards from different academic societies.

During his Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence fellowship, Dr. Dutta aims to exploit a multiplex CRISPR-Cas9 toolkit, targeting multiple susceptibility or S genes, to confer root-knot nematode (Meloidogyne incognita) resistance in model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and tomato via loss of host compatibility. Knowledge gained about the function of S genes in nematode-infected plants can be translated into future research endeavors on other plant-pathogen interaction models.